Weekend Reading: Dr. Livingston, I Presume

Weekend Reading: a weekly column of my favorite long magazine stories from the past week. They’re also often collected on twitter and Longreads.com. (Read past ones here, here, and here.)

When my mind is wandering, I sometimes like to Google past N.B.A. drafts. Who was picked, say, nine years ago? You see failed promise, but also promise fulfilled. There are obvious blunders, but the predictions of general managers are pretty darn good. As anyone who watched last night’s Celtics-Heat game knows, LeBron James (No. 1), Chris Bosh (No. 4), and Dwayne Wade (No. 5) are all quite a bit better than Mickaël Piétrus (No. 12) and Sasha Pavlović (No. 19).

The other draft-like lists I like to Google are those of the journalists nominated for the annual Livingston Awards, a prize given by the University of Michigan to writers under the age of thirty-five. The past winners have plenty in common with past number-one picks. I work with (or for) quite a few of them. The story about the massacre in Dos Erres, Guatemala, that I wrote about last week was written by another winner. When I worked at Legal Affairs, one of my colleagues, Emily Bazelon, was nominated three years in a row. She’s doing quite well now.

The awards were announced this week, and the winners were, as usual, terrific. The award for local reporting went to Andrew McLemore, of The Williamson County Sun, for a gripping piece about Michael Morton, a man who spent twenty-five years in jail after being falsely accused of murdering his wife. It’s a story much like “The Shawshank Redemption.” You can see why the court got it wrong—but you can also see the hidden evidence and clues that could have saved Morton. D.N.A. evidence has now freed him, but much of his life is lost. His son, who witnessed the actual murder at age three, is now twenty-eight. As McLemore writes about Morton, “He went to prison when Ronald Reagan was president. The Internet was still eight years away. His fingers forgot how to button a shirt.”

The award for national reporting went to ProPublica, for a terrific series about redistricting. It’s not really relaxing beach reading; it’s more for poring over at your desk when you’re angry about the ways that our political system has been corrupted. The award for international reporting went to Mattathias Schwartz, whose piece for us on a massacre in Jamaica I mentioned last week. He spent almost three months living in a difficult part of Kingston, winning the trust of a community whose members had been slaughtered by Jamaican security forces after the United States asked that government to hunt down and extradite a drug lord. “Think of this as a customer-service report on American foreign policy,” Schwartz said while accepting the award on Wednesday.

Of course, I adore the two other New Yorker nominees: Julia Ioffe’s timely Profile of the Russian anti-corruption crusader Alexey Navalny, and Rachel Aviv’s haunting story “God Knows Where I Am,” about a woman’s descent into madness. Another great long story nominated this year is Nathaniel Rich’s piece in Harper’s about Joan Ginther, the mysterious woman who has won the Texas lottery four times. There are lots of possible explanations for her victories, but, as Rich explains, none of them really make sense.

Here’s a full list of the nominees. Read it like an alphabetical list of the players picked in the first round of the N.B.A. draft this year.

Illustration by Kate Prior.

Nicholas Thompson is the editor of newyorker.com where he oversees and manages the magazine’s Web site.